Angel City's Big Bet on Women’s Soccer

Why does Natalie get the best stuff I had? Natalie, I know that I'm.

Karen Nortman, I'm Emily Chang, and this is the Circuit. They're the buzziest women's pro soccer team in the US, and they're betting that this is the next billion dollar sports opportunity. On this episode of The Circuit, I sit down with the founders of Angel CITYFC, venture capitalist Karen Nortman,

Do you get nervous before every game?

Oh? God, yes, game before an interview? Now the game, I walk around with the trash backs.

Yeah, like Julie, we've prepared as much as we can. I'm like that doesn't comfort me, Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah No.

I was wondering, like how much does winning really matter?

It matters, It matters, It makes anything easier, and like it's like your kids, right, you want them to perform, You want them to win because it's you just you want it for them, You want it for the fans like you want it right, right, So it's it's a lot.

I don't think we've ever done this.

Have you not?

Yeah, let's let's be exciting. What's gonna happen. We're all pretty good at talking.

We're gonna take turns.

I've never done this, all three of us.

I mean, we've been together in lots of places we have not done like a formal interview like this opening day.

How does it feel? How is the team gelling? Looking to you?

Do you mean the teama looks incredible?

We made some amazing additions in the off season, including Alyssa Thompson, who's our homegrown.

Hero high school student from Harvard.

Westlake graduating this year. But we have a souldout crowd tonight for a home opener, and we couldn't be more excited.

Natalie, I've heard you tell this beautiful story, like wasn't it your son that got you hooked and also made you realize that maybe we could change how we view women's sports.

We were watching the Women's World Cup and I saw my son, who was I think seven at the time, idolizing the female players in the same way that he idolized the male players. And when I saw him, you know, wanting a Rappino jersey and an Alex Morgan jersey and a Christian Press jersey just as much as he wanted to Messi and Mbappe and Griesman jerseys, I was like, this is a way to change culture, Like what a

I mean, this just started out as a kernel of an idea and now you are breaking attendance records, Like what was the spark that lit the fire that got you to start Angel City?

Well, Karen and I met at a times up event.

Times Up.

If you don't know already, which you probably do. Was it a group of women in various industries working towards women's equity in the workplace. And Kara had started the kind of VC version of that called All Rays, and we met through that, and then we met some of the female players from the US national team and heard.

Their fight for pay equity.

It really helped us understand that soccer was an incredible opportunity to use something joyful to spread equity. Karen and I started talking about what would it look like if we brought a team to LA and then Karen brought Julian, who they had known each other forever and she has been leading us since. So it's been a really group, incredible group effort.

Kerr, you're a venture capitalist, and so you've spent years trying to make tech companies profitable. Like, what is the plan to turn Angel City into the next Unicorn?

Yeah, well, I think we should get rid of that word unicorn at this point.

All Right, it's gottenable business.

That can keep breaking through glass ceilings and all ceilings. It's a unique opportunity in women's sports to do that.

But I think the interesting thing about sports.

Relative to tech, we talk about product market fit a lot in tech, which means you're actually trying to build to a new consumer and user behavior that may not exist in sports. We're literally trying to put butts in seats, and so once you put the butts in the seats,

So I think the really interesting about the thing about women's.

Sports and Angel City is specifically, is that you can get into the tens of millions of dollars of revenue.

Even before media revenue.

And so we have a plan to be the first hundred million dollar revenue business in women's sports, and I think we're constantly sort of trying to figure out how to do the core things put butts in seats, really bring in mission aligned sponsors while building to new revenue streams that may be even more innovative than the men's side.

Yeah, well that's the boy, right.

You've got this ownership group filled with all of these powerful collaborators.

Mostly women.

What kind of energy do they bring to the table like different than a traditional Maile owner.

It's incredibly different. It's a majority female ownership group. And we all came together because we wanted to drive to equity. Truly, we had a larger purpose of building Angel City, which is true equity, and for players, that's pay equity, but it's viewership equity, it's media attention, it's butts and seats, and so we realized the self using our platform and

It is an incredible product.

On the pitch.

So when you participate with Angel City, when you join us, not only you driving equity, but you're also celebrating these incredible athletes and giving them an experience they deserve they haven't had before.

Do you feel the culture changing.

I mean, it takes generations to build serious fandom and you've done it in like a few years.

Oh.

I mean, that's the thing about this It's so special and you'll fill it tonight.

The electricity. It's like these joyful movements where if.

You look in the stadium tonight, it represents Los Angeles. It's you know, it's pretty equally male, female, black, white, brown, gay, straight. It's it's like it is La And so again, it's one of those things where I always talk about sports, it's socially acceptable tribalism and like the highs and the lows.

But you sit next like you have a Democrat and Republicans.

Sitting next to each other may not even realize it, and they're hugging each other. It has I think for me personally as someone who's kind of been passionate about gender equity, I think, as we.

All have our whole lives, this it's a.

Place where diversity in the investment group, in the c suite, in the coaching staff is driving outcomes, it's driving enterprise value. People are showing up to women's sports, women's soccer, but many women's sports as much out of joy and even greed as they are, like it's as much carrot as it is stick. And I really firmly believe that Joyful Movements is a much faster way to prove the DEI case than anything else, and it's seeing them hand in hand as making change.

You've got Kristin Kress, who, of course is a huge soccer star. You've talked about Alyssa Thompson, the high schooler tech.

People love data. Sports people love data.

Julie, how are you building the team to set it up for success using those building plots?

Yeah, I mean we want to build a winning team, so to find the best players in each position, but we also care about building a diverse team, about building a team that's relatable, that's reflective of our community, that are los angeless, so you can come see your favorite player that may have played at your high school or played at your college.

That's important to us.

Because it's about building community in.

A sense of belonging.

And so we think about the international star, the US star, the high school star. How can we build a team where you can ultimately see yourself.

And want to be a fan of the bigger ambition here is about changing the economics of women's sports right. More broadly, Natalie, how is Angel City trying to drive value back to players, back to the community.

I think we're one of the first teams to have a percentage of Jersey sales go back to the players. Percentage of all of the sponsorships go back into the community.

So it's been an.

Incredible, incredible way that we can give back a little bit to the community that gives us so much. Like the community has brought such incredible energy to this game that it's really like the best feeling that we can give back.

Can you believe that?

Like this?

You know, what was it three years ago this started and now you're here today? I mean, how does that feeling like sink in?

It's a while to sink in.

I mean, it's been a movement, right every single day we've been building and adding to what it is we're doing, and we've been doing it with the community, and so every day the fandom and the audience and the sport has grown, and I think it's really propelled us to where we are today because we care just amount of We care just as much about the product on the pitch as the impact we make in our community, and we lead with our values, which is what springs us all together.

The game has been changing slowly, I mean, huge milestone obviously the pay equity settlement between the women to men's national team. Does it feel like the game is changing or is there just so much more.

I mean it does because you know, I had a chance to be at the sold out Euro Finals at Wembley and we were all there again at a soldout Wembley for.

The US England game.

But you're also seeing sold out stadiums in news for the Black Ferns, you know, kind of media records, revenue records being broken.

For the first year ever.

In Premier League women's cricket in India, twenty five thousand fans show up to watch the fourth Division Newcastle team, the first time the women play in the men's stadium. So I think the thing that's very cool, you know, It's just it's this moment in time where when you.

Show people it's possible, more people try.

And it is like it is the thing I always I do joke around that.

It took now I should.

Say, the female, who are you talking about? I always have a growth mindset, but it literally took Natalie saying why don't we bring a team to LA And initially I was like that sounds really hard, and she said do you know how to do these things?

Like I yeah, but you need X, Y and Z, you need a stadium, you need you know, investors, you need a president. You need all of these different things.

And but what the reason I think it's changing so quickly now is because the world.

Has wanted it for a very long time. And you know, I think we hit the market in the right way.

And there's continuing to be examples set as to why it's possibilities and all the different ways it can show up in different cities and countries, and.

So more and more people will put real.

Money in and will attempt to do things that they thought were impossible.

Three or four years ago.

Julian aspiration, I know is to be a global brand. Yes, what are the other building blocks that you need? Like what else needs to happen? Being a global brand allows everything else to happen. If you're a global brand, you draw the most attention and awareness. Then I can capture that fan base and try to convert them into Angel City fans, get them to pay for merch, get them to.

Come to games.

When someone comes to a game, one percent of our gate receipts goes back to our players. When a sponsor wants to align with us because we have the largest audience and we're value aligned, ten percent of their sponsorship dollars goes back into the community through our equity essentials and education platform. So the larger I get and the more exposure and I can bring them into the Angel City family, the more impact I can have for my players and our community.

The circuit continues after this quick break.

Natalie, I've heard you talk about Times Up and how until Times Up there was this sense of women always competing against each other, but you learned how to compete as a team as a team of women.

Has Angel City helped drive that point home? Like watching these women compete as a team.

Absolutely, I mean the model of having a team where every woman's goal is the whole team's goal. That reflects into what we strive for as women working together, and it absolutely it's like the perfect model for girls and women to learn from. To see all these women like jumping on top of each other when one of them scores, you know, and it's how we all try to support each other too.

Carrie, you're launching this new thing, monarch Collective. I believe it's called where you're trying to help elevate women's sports and give people more investing power.

Can you explain.

Yeah, So it's going to be a dedicated pool of capital to invest in women's sports teams, leagues.

And very specific rights based adjacency. We think it'll be the first of its kind that's exclusively focused on women, but hopefully there will be many more that we collaborate with and help put in business and work alongside you know, the Men's Funds, which is if you bring the right kind of coalitions into the investment group that represent that community and represent different skill sets, and you bring over playbooks from teams that are working in women's and men's sports,

It's been five years since Time's Up, five years since pro Topia, you know where we talk about.

Thees bro Topia jure.

I mean, we're talking about all this progress, But do you ever feel like we've we've lost some of the progress, or that sometimes things are moving backwards.

I think that our path is never going to be linear, and I think for us to think that everything's going to be perfect and kumbaya all the way through is not paying on interested in the fact that everything everything good in life is hard, and that I think, honestly, one of the most important things I've learned through all the gender equity work and through Angel City is we all also have to be able to make mistakes, be different, hit setbacks, and not feel shame or badly about it.

Women need to not expect ourselves to be perfect.

How would you answer that question?

Obviously at Hollywood, is it ever a few steps forward and a few steps back?

Yeah? I think that there we're a lot of great strides made, and of course then there's also, you know, always things that are happening in the world. There's different challenges that women are facing everywhere and will continue to face unfortunately for a long time. But that's what makes all of this like even more meaningful because the whole goal is to uplift these women and value them the way they deserve to be valued. And like they've been saying,

That is what we're we have to improve. What's our responsibility as parents?

And honestly, I'm feeling this now based on the things I've heard all of you say, like I want my sons to wear Kristin Press jerseys and Melissa Thompson. You know, what can we do as parents to help accelerate the culture change that we want to see?

That's a great question. I mean, the easiest way is to watch the games. You know, you can watch it at at home or you know, come in person if you have the ability to come in in a city where there's games, But just to watch the games, I think is like that's why it's like it's very easy and fun, you know, like it's not broccoli.

Yeah.

The other thing is I mean I learned this from Natalie and aby Wanbach and others. But even if you're you know, you fancy yourself progressive and a gender equity activist, we don't realize our own embedded sexism, misogyny, whatever it is. And I think Natalie's story is really telling. I think we all feel that way sometimes, even we just assume our kids are going to have certain preferences, and they don't. It's like they are growing up in a completely different

Miss an Angel City game.

And so the power of growing up as a girl today thinking you could be president or a professional athlete, there's power in that, but there's just as much power in and like the men of tomorrow, seeing women in their power, sweating and loving it. And so I think those two things, just showing up as parents and letting them fall in love in their own way.

With sports, there's more teams coming to the US, and we've also actually seen the women's club game in Europe kind of take off. How are you watching what's happening in Europe? And how does it compare to what's happening in the United States.

I mean, the growth in women's football is everywhere. I mean, you see it when Chelsea plays Arsenal, you see when Barcelona plays at Camp No, you see at the Euro Finals. You're seeing it the FIFA World Cup this year, when they changed the stadium to a stadium that was twice as big because they already sold out the tickets. The reality is people want to watch women's sports, they want to invest in women's sports, they want to support women's sports.

Out crowd today.

We're gonna have twelve games and we're gonna have twelve sold out games. That's because we're making sure people know that we exist. The more people can tell the story, the easier it is for people to.

Become a fan.

The league has rappled with allegations of sexual assaults and harassment, and I know a number of coaches have resigned or left. Do you feel like that's fully behind the league or is there still work?

Yeah, I mean I would say it is behind the League, which is to say, we've addressed the past and we're putting in rules, in policies and procedures to make sure that we have a safe and secure environment for a players, an opportunity to voice any concerns in the training of our staff and coaches, to create an environment where our players can.

Actually be the best they can be.

It would be my naive to say that it's over and nothing will ever happen again, but we are working hard to create the safest and.

Best environment for our players.

So when you look across the landscape, where do you see other places to elevate women and women leaders in the game.

That'll trickle all the way down to the youth level.

I think about like me as a mom, my kids play soccer like I want them to experience this beautiful world that we are all driving towards, that you are driving us towards.

Where do you see the gaps? And what else needs to.

Change first and foremost is just the distribution of the actually being able to watch the games and then the storytelling around it.

And so last year, if you wanted to watch all the Angel City games, you had to subscribe I think to four or five different streaming services, one of which was only in Spanish. You have to work hard to be a say and you say, there are no lazy female sports fans. They don't exist, So we aspire for lazy fans, you.

Know, like that would be great. But I think the second.

Part of is really important. It is the storytelling. You know, women are natural storytellers. If you look at the social media following even of the players in the final four of the NCAAAA tournament men's and women's, you'll see the women's players tend to have a lot more followers than the men's players. So I think high quality content that makes us feel connected to the story of these players' lives is really important. And then I think the final

I'll just take women's.

Soccer because it's the one we're talking about today. We have, you know, twelve teams, going to a few more.

In most mature men's.

Leagues you have thirty to thirty six teams, and so getting teams in cities so you guys can show up in your hometown with your sons, and so it is a little bit like the NFL or NBA probably in the eighties or nineties, and so more places you can touch and feel it in the real world and digitally we'll just naturally take on its own life.

Yeah, have you traded in notes with any of the other ownership groups, like a chance? Are they calling you and saying like, how can I do this?

No?

This is one thing about where that comes up all the time that I love to talk about because I didn't know this didn't happen, is that.

It's just super collaborative across the board.

On the business side of that, I was just in Salt Lake City for the announcement of the Salt Lake women's team and they're like, Tu, he's.

Been so amazing and helping the next Meazy Natalie's been so amazing.

So I think all three of us always say.

Call us up, will help.

However, we can move playbooks over share our models, and I mean, I think think it's like it's almost like the open source movement. I think of it as like open sourcing what works, because you're going to see such cool innovation in different ways in Kansas versus North Carolina versus Louisville and wherever else.

Yeah, So Natalie is the dream our little boys and girls looking at Kristin Press or Sidney LaRue or Alyssa Thompson and saying like, that's my mafe, that's my messy.

Absolutely.

I mean, I think there's a lot of kids already who are looking at Kristin Press and Lissa Thompson and all of our players as their heroes, and it is just more about then getting value to those heroes, because that's the thing is that the demand is already there. It just needs, like we need to be able to supply it to people.

Easily in their living rooms.

You know, I think those players are already high up in all this kid's eyes.

Yeah, we've got them momentum from the men's World Cup, but let's be honest, the women have won. The US women have won two World Cups in a row. When it comes to that level of the game, when are women going to get the recognition that they deserve?

Well, I hope it's the year they fought hard and won a lawsuit against US Soccer for equal pay, FIFA saying the All Egal prize money by twenty twenty seven and I think this is just another opportunity to show the world how incredible they are and how deserving they are of equality.

It was a two hundred billion dollar event, the Men's World Cup. I mean, I believe that's the one of the biggest in history. I mean, come on, listen.

A billion people watched the last Women's World Cup.

A billion. I mean, that's just amazing. None of us would be sitting here if it wasn't for the Women's World Cup.

It was a twenty fifteen World Cup that started my journey to Angel City. Natalie and I really built a friendship i'd say around the twenty nineteen World Cup, and that was a huge part of what allowed us to come together.

And joint purpose to realize we definitely needed to find this woman and listen.

Like I would say, I think the more we can just push out data and sort of separate out data of people are watching.

How much revenue is generated, how much was put in.

You know, of course we want things to be completely equal overnight, but I think if we can just have transparency around the data and just keep leaning in and getting better and better, I mean, soccer and sports like it does lift the world up. I mean, there's a reason why Nelson Mandela is up there talking about sports when he's you know, unifying South Africa. It is this joyful way of bringing equity and making change in the world. And so I think we're both impatient but also patient.

I know, obviously the team is getting chosen right in the way this is kind of like auditions. Does that add an extra layer of excitement or nerves?

I think it's competition and it's good competition, right. You want to perform well for your team so that your national team coach will recognize you and call you up. And we have players on the Canadian team and the Jamaican team, and the Japanese team and the sky we'd really like to get someone on the US women's national team.

So it starts today for the.

Twenty twenty three World Cup. Several Angel City players were chosen to play in the tournament, including two for the US team, But despite their big splash, Angel City struggled to put up a winning record out of the gate, and the team fired its first head coach, though there are challenges on the field ahead. Few would have bet they'd come this far this fast.

So you're trying to build a soccer slash football club for the future. What doesn't it look like let's say five ten years from now that's changed.

Yeah, I mean well, Angel City has sold out games every time we played. But more importantly, the other twelve and fourteen teams in the league are also seeing sold out products. Yeah, that they are investing in their players, investing in their community, building a product that people want to go see, and the excitement the tension around women's football is national.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Circuit.

I'm Emily Chang.

You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Emily Chang TV. You can watch new episodes of the Circuit on Bloomberg Television or on demand by downloading the Bloomberg app to your smart TV and check out our other Bloomberg podcasts on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartMedia app, or wherever you listen to shows and let us know what you think by leaving us a review. I'm your host and executive producer. Our senior producer is Lauren Ellis. Our Associate